The last of the old thrillers

Tools

Because
motion pictures require a good deal of time to plan, finance, produce, edit,
publicize, and release, The Bourne
Identity, a typical espionage thriller dealing with violent international
intrigue, lags far behind current events and contemporary awareness. Although
calling the picture “a 21st century spy film,” the folks who put the
whole complicated, expensive project together could not possibly have known
just how irrelevant and obsolete their movie would seem in this time and place.
If, for example, a generally horrible flick like The Sum of All Fears accidentally foreshadows the present
administration’s dream of a nuclear catastrophe, The Bourne Identity resembles many movies of what now seems a
distant past, describing a familiar situation no longer so likely after the
transforming events of September 11, 2001.

Based on the Robert Ludlum novel
(previously made as a television film), The
Bourne Identity presents a vision of the attitudes and behaviors of the
Central Intelligence Agency that, no matter how true, no longer applies in the
same way. Although the CIA boasts a long, shabby history of malice and
incompetence, nowadays public utterances from the Bush administration proclaim
the agency as both the savior of the bumbling FBI --- those guys couldn’t find
their posterior if their hands were in their back pockets --- but also, God
help us, as something like the first line of defense against terrorism. The Bourne Identity, however, presents a
CIA reminiscent of dozens of novels and films, an agency staffed by rogue
operatives and murderous schemers ready to betray and kill out of some crazed
vision of American foreign policy.

As its title implies, and in keeping
with the traditions of its form, the movie confronts the problem of identity as
a sort of modern mystery. An Italian fishing boat encounters the central
character, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), floating in the Mediterranean, nearly
drowned, with a couple of bullets in him. In addition, a small metal cylinder
that shows the number of a Swiss bank account is embedded beneath his skin.
That number provides the only clue to the identity of the wounded man, who
suffers from the familiar Hollywood amnesia, having no idea who he is, where he
comes from, or how he wound up in the drink.

The situation allows the filmmakers
to present a nearly perfect, if predictably violent and melodramatic, exercise
in something like pure existentialism. With no memory of the past, no name, no
background, no context, in the gradual process of recovering his history,
Bourne must in effect continually invent himself, creating his own new identity
under the most dangerous circumstances, finding himself competent in the face
of attacks from a variety of enemies. He discovers that he speaks several
languages fluently, fights ferociously with several opponents, and --- since
his Swiss safe deposit box contains a gun and six different passports along
with a bundle of money --- that he must be involved in something highly
dangerous and highly illegal.

Bourne ultimately learns, mostly
through a series of violent encounters and narrow escapes, that he has served
as an assassin for the CIA until his scruples apparently overcame his training
and conditioning. The script hints at some sort of mechanical device that
programs his actions and apparently kicks in when he needs to apply his
expertise at unarmed combat, breaking and entering, climbing up buildings, or
outracing police vehicles in a minicar; his violation of his programming led to
his wounding and his amnesia. When Bourne finds out who he really is, he is not
entirely happy with the solution to his mystery; the realization of his old
self motivates his need to create the new one.

It seems doubtful that another
Hollywood picture will present the CIA quite so negatively as The Bourne Identity. In this movie the
agents operate with the ferocity, barbarism, and utter lawlessness of
international gangsters: assassinating political leaders, murdering anyone who
obstructs them, and betraying each other in a manner that would shame a
Mafioso. In a time when government leaders openly prepare the public to regard
such activities as desirable and admirable, the spy thriller will probably
avoid the usual practice of making the CIA the villains, thus reversing a
decades-old trend in fictional and cinematic espionage.

The director, Doug Liman, allows the
movie’s central mystery to unfold in an exciting, entertaining manner,
interrupting sequences of fierce action with interludes of dialogue too brief
to slow down the pace. The blandness and passivity of Matt Damon may suit a man
without an identity, but otherwise create very little intrinsic appeal; in a
stroke of, well, intelligence, the producers cast the colossally uninteresting
Franka Potente opposite him, thus endowing Damon by contrast with considerably
more presence than he actually possesses. The
Bourne Identity, however, succeeds through its excellent and authentic
location shooting, its quick cutting, its pervasive sense of urgency, and its
constant motion toward a mysterious goal: a useful formula for the sort of spy
thriller that, even as I write, may now be obsolete.